Baby's first tarantula!

Sorry for the delayed post, but i have moved and it's taking a while to get re-settled in. All the education sector people are now living in El Seibo, a town in the eastern part of the country. I once again have a little old dona who is super sweet. this one, dona agueda, is much quieter though, which is...very different. i am definitely still getting accustomed to not having 800 people running in and out of my house all yelling for each other all day. Now it's just me, my dona, and our little dog bandito! he is only 8 months old and is pretty cute, despite his unfortunate handicap of being a small dog. he is always trying to hump my leg though. gotta put an end to that particular habit!

So I'm sure you are all wondering about the title of my post. yes indeed, i saw my first tarantula! it was pretty exciting and i forgot to be nervous. we hadn't learned yet about their mad jumping skills, so i was more intrigued than nervous. besides their bites hurt like a mother but they don't kill you or anything. anyway, i had my volunteer visit last weekend up in the northern part of the country, in the Cibao region (which coincidently is GORGEOUS). It was a great visit. i was there for 4 days and got to see my volunteer's youth group, helped her prepare for a charla on AIDS awareness and women's health, and basically just got to see all the things she is working on. it was really nice to get advice from someone in the field, as opposed to just hearing stories and brief meetings with volunteers at the training center. it was a big reality check, but ultimately just got me more excited about starting my service. so anyway about the tarantula: so my volunteer's host mother is the mayor's sister. and the mayor's daughter had her 10th birthday party while i was there (it was awesome by the way, if i could eat that cake for the rest of my life i would die fat and happy). So we stayed at the party until it was after dark and when we were walking home we were looking at the stars. they were stunning but we wanted to get out of town a bit because some lights were distracting us. There was another volunteer visiting so the three of us walked around the lake outside of town to look at the stars and we even saw some shooting stars which is always fun. I am aware this is a really long lead up to the tarantula by the way, but deal with it. So we brought flashlights with us because obviously it was very dark. i was scanning the ground and saw something move quickly on the side of the lighted area and managed to catch it in my beam. like cops in a helicopter or something haha. anyway it was a tarantula! i have pictures i will put up as soon as i can, i will spare you all the details but suffice it to say it is difficult getting internet here, and much moreso to get it on my heavy laptop.

So long story short, i had a wonderful, exciting volunteer visit and have moved out of Santo Domingo. two big events in about a week's time. here's the zinger though: after i got back from my volunteer visit i got crazy sick. once again i will spare the deets and just say it was gastritis. you do the math. so moving and packing with all that going on was not fun. luckily i am feeling better now. and super luckily it wasn't appendicitis which the doctors were worried about because i was in so much pain and my coloring. apparently i'm just a wuss. who knew?

holy strawberries batman, this is bananas!

the food here is awesome. whoever said the peace corps was the best diet ever clearly wasn't placed in the dominican republic! the fruit is insane. every time i eat a banana, i enter a state of nirvana. i don't like mangos in the US, but here? don't even get me started. and i know it's early on to make such a declarative statement, but i may never get sick of rice and beans. or yuca. yuca is definitely hit or miss with people, but for me it's a huge hit. when i told my dona i had never had yuca before she replied asking if i had ever had rice and beans. that's how big of a staple it is here!

all this said though, i would kill for a piece of chocolate. or some salty chips. basically any piece of the crap that really sticks to your gut back home. just lemme at it. also hot sauce. they really don't like spicy foods here at all, which surprised me. although some volunteers have discovered hot sauce at the sirena (basically a walmart) so i think i may have to cave and get in on that action. i have been fairly good about saving money so far, (my only indulgences have been the bracelets from the market and a patch for my bag), but this feels like a justified purchase to me. although i would hate to offend my dona and show up with hot sauce. it might have to wait until i have my own place. at which time i will most definitely be getting a dog by the way. so many volunteers here have dogs, and i know some of them are bringing their dogs back. so there is a precedence here, and i'm following it!

so we have been having several hours of spanish class everyday along with safety, cultural, and medical training throughout the week. and i actually feel like i have improved some, but mostly i think it's due to the interactive aspects of life here. whether it's practicing out in the city, activities in class, or, most importantly practicing mi espanol en mi casa, i really have started to sense some improvement. as in now i can sometimes tell what is sort of going on. it's a start, what can i say.

speaking of going out into the city, i have come to realize that santo domingo is actually a pretty cool city. the DR has a rich and turbulent history, and you can see remnants of it still in the city. partially this is due to reconstruction by the spanish, but still. we can now see christopher columbus' house which is pretty cool, even if he wasn't exactly the greatest of human beings. that's me practicing the dominican technique of "understatement" by the way.

another interesting tidbit: it rains here just about everyday. and yet i've managed to get a burn. how is that possible you ask? it's because it can be sunny and bright and gorgeous and suddenly out of nowhere rainclouds will appear. on saturday a group of us went to the botanical gardens which was absolutely gorgeous ( this is a picture of the explorers and i also took lots of pictures of flowers duh) and i got some serious sun. not a bad burn, but definitely some sun. and lo and behold the next day is equally sunny. we had a tour of the colonial zone in santo domingo on sunday and i figured i would bring my raincoat just in case, despite the fact that the afternoon was shaping up to be the same as the day before. the first hour of the tour was hot, and so sunny i couldn't really take good pictures and then suddenly we were in the middle of a torrential downpour that lasted for over an hour and we had to cancel the rest of the tour! it felt good though.

Rule no. 1: no excuses play like a champion

I promise this post is not gonna be me bitching about the peace corps. anything but actually. however, i will say the peace corps is not for anyone who is anything less than entirely committed. This first week has been incredible, emotional, and quite the struggle all at once. If the year long application process doesn't weed out the truly dedicated, training certainly will. that said, i am so excited to be here. every day i wake up more enthused about my situation than the day before. everyday i learn new aspects of the culture, and i know i am still just testing the waters.
our education trainer came and spoke to us today about what to expect in the upcoming weeks. we are moving to another town in the north of the DR with just the education trainees. there we will have our community based training (cbt) and will begin to learn the specifics of what we are going to be doing for the next 2 years. she got me so excited about it all. i haven't felt more secure in my decision to be here than when i walked out of that meeting.
i am glad that my emotions are starting to settle down a bit. it's not that i ever despaired, it's just that i felt for a while that i was all over the place. But now that i'm really making new friends, and just diving into each new experience, i am growing more and more comfortable here. the DR really is an amazing country. it is loud, beautiful, loud, happy, and loud. sometimes i hear music blaring (or maybe i should say i feel the music blaring) and i figure that it must be just outside my window. false! it is coming from a car all the way down the street. yikes cripes, those drivers must not have eardrums.
today (or yesterday when i post this) we learned the bachata and the merengue. roughly at least. it was so much fun. our teachers are fantastic dancers and then we all looked equally awesome, i'm sure, as we tried to emulate their movements. there were differing levels of success, that's for sure! i for one kept switching the order of my feet when i would step for the bachata. oops.

also you guys are getting totally spoiled. 2 posts in 2 days? what?

C'est La Vie...Oh wait that's french

so my spanish sucks. it's coming along though. little by little. the best and worst part is that the dialect here is ridiculously difficult to understand. So your learning skills are immediately kicked into high gear, but it is strenuous and very tiring. I am exhausted at the end of each day, but that's ok! that just means i can sleep through the rooster outside my window all the better.
ok i need to say 2 things: number one, sorry i havent posted yet, it's not my fault! we don't really have internet here. if you manage to actually get on at the peace corps training center not only are you incredibly lucky but you only have minutes before it shuts down on you again. which leads me to my second point: i had a huge blog post all written and ready to be uploaded yesterday, i got to the office, actually managed to get some internet going on on my ipad and...oh snap, the app on my ipad broke after i tried to save a draft locally. soooo i lost the post. bummer times.

so i have come to realize i have been incredibly lucky in my peace corps experiences so far. first of all, i got placed in the DR. i mean come on...that's pretty awesome. second, my host family is basically the best ever. My Dona (i can't figure out how to do the squiggly thing on this keyboard...) is the second best mother i've ever had. She has this huge extended family who are always in and out of the house, where the door is never closed, and she seems to cook for all of them. when they realized she wasn't gonna be cooking meat for a few weeks, she walked over to me, threw her arms around me and declared "we are vegetarian now!". everything she does just makes me feel so welcome. actually all of the women i have met here could not be more generous and genuinely happy to just spend time with people. I find myself wandering out onto the patio now because i know that soon some other family member, be it the grandson, a daughter, the great grandson, will come join me in a matter of minutes. ok another reason i'm lucky is that i have had a functional toilet my entire time here. i will spare you the details, just suffice it to say, i'm lucky.

So there are three other volunteers who live in the same area as me. a married couple lives with dona estella (the daughter of my dona) right above my casa and another volunteer lives just across parking lot from my house. hopefully i will find a way to post pictures soon. it all comes back to that no-internet thing. I am glad to be so near some other volunteers because when the spanish just becomes too much for my poor brain to cope with i can escape and play domino, tablero, and/or bananagrams with them! so we play games every night. except last night when we went to a barbeque in our barrio. There were 5 volunteers there and several Dominican families including one who had moved to miami and is here visiting their families. it was so much fun! we danced merengue, drank some cervesa, ate lots of food, and just talked well into the night. It was so relaxed and loud at the same time. although everything here is loud. apparently this is the third loudest country in the world. the rumor is that some dominicans remove the mufflers from their cars just to make them louder. i believe it.
gosh! i just feel like there is so much to write about, but i need to save some for more posts. so i will wrap up saying happy birthday to me! and that i had a nice little celebration with my neighbor volunteers over several rounds of bananagrams and now it is time for some well deserved sleep. peace out hombres.